“The essay is, after all, but a game – a short-lived liaison with the reader; while the novel, in the worst case, marriage, or in the best passion and love. You don’t have the balls for that, I can tell these things about men. How much they bear. I look at you, and I say to myself: for one night it would be fine, were I a few decades younger – but if you asked me to move in with you, or for God’s sake meet one more time, I would refuse without a second thought – and believe me, Tamás, not only for my sake.”

Published in the catalog of the European First Novel Festival, 2008

{ The Scarcity Shop }

A hiánycikkek boltja

Excerpt from Flyers’ Handbook

“If until this point I had felt like the hero in a penny romance novel, I now felt the unknown forces in an American spy film playing with me, my fate at the end of a bobbing string. The protagonist, sent on a secret assignment, now faces a moral dilemma: Should he sacrifice the budding relationship on the altar of work or leave everything behind and escape the life and death situation with his love to some God-forsaken Carribbean village to live happily ever after, making their living from fishing and frog farming? Or could the protagonist reveal to her his assignment and its importance? Undoubtedly not, since it would seem like work was more important than to him she was. I couldn’t help thinking about Kierkegaard.”

Published in Pilvax Magazine, October 2005

{ My Father’s Library }

Apám könyvtára

“Trouble began when after a hasty exchange of declarations of war, the production lines of the nearby Sapientia Pharmaceutical Works were immediately converted to the production of mustard gas, leaving the complete mental health care system of the country without sedatives. Standing besides the bookcase of the great Russians, by the only telephone of the asylum complex, I asked the county superintendent how am I supposed to keep a hundred and fifty delusional lunatics and paranoids at bay by myself, but the drunken voice on the other side seemed to be inflexible.”

“She had this theory, or I might say conviction, that as every natural language carries in itself the historical memory of the community that speaks it, from legendary migrations and traumatic invasions or colonizations to eras of great wealth and security, so are all constructed languages fundamentally determined by the psychological profiles and personal histories of their initial creators.”

The Danube Queen / Duna királynőExcerpt from the novel in progress Cities of Water

“For in every thermal bath of Budapest, there is a girl who emerges time and again from the white veils of the undulating mist, sometimes lays down on the wet marble benches, or sits quietly for hours in the hottest of the hot tubs where medical recommendation would only allow ten or fifteen minutes at a time; who swims several circles in a row underwater, among the patiently paddling pensioners and the fast and furious fanatics of sport; who is quietly greeted by every regular of the bath as an old acquaintance, but is never spoken to; and who is never seen entering or leaving the premises of the swimming pool.” (Translated by the author)

“The essay is, after all, but a game – a short-lived liaison with the reader; while the novel, in the worst case, marriage, or in the best passion and love. You don’t have the balls for that, I can tell these things about men. How much they bear. I look at you, and I say to myself: for one night it would be fine, were I a few decades younger – but if you asked me to move in with you, or for God’s sake meet one more time, I would refuse without a second thought – and believe me, Tamás, not only for my sake.”Published in the catalog of the European First Novel Festival, 2008. (Translated by Dunajcsik Péter Maxigas)

“If until this point I had felt like the hero in a penny romance novel, I now felt the unknown forces in an American spy film playing with me, my fate at the end of a bobbing string. The protagonist, sent on a secret assignment, now faces a moral dilemma: Should he sacrifice the budding relationship on the altar of work or leave everything behind and escape the life and death situation with his love to some God-forsaken Carribbean village to live happily ever after, making their living from fishing and frog farming? Or could the protagonist reveal to her his assignment and its importance? Undoubtedly not, since it would seem like work was more important than to him she was. I couldn’t help thinking about Kierkegaard.”Published in Pilvax Magazine, October 2005. (Translated by Sam Poole)

“Trouble began when after a hasty exchange of declarations of war, the production lines of the nearby Sapientia Pharmaceutical Works were immediately converted to the production of mustard gas, leaving the complete mental health care system of the country without sedatives. Standing besides the bookcase of the great Russians, by the only telephone of the asylum complex, I asked the county superintendent how am I supposed to keep a hundred and fifty delusional lunatics and paranoids at bay by myself, but the drunken voice on the other side seemed to be inflexible.” (Translated by the author)